Signature Profiles

Artist Bio

Illustrated his Queen Anne High School yearbook (graduate 1971) and attended Seattle Community College for art courses under Rudy Bundas & Ray Gerring. He apprenticed under his father, Robert C. Wikstrom, a noted illustrator and graphic artist. He traveled the U.S. by freight trains and hitchhiking and was living in New Orleans in 1975 working as a sign and display artist. While swimming in the Mississippi River, he sustained an injury to his spinal cord and became paralyzed from the shoulders down. He redeveloped his art skills by holding the brush in his mouth and years later became a member of the International Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists.

He received a grant to develop an art program at Children's Hospital in Seattle and began exhibiting and demonstrating his art at festivals and conferences. His work entered notable collections including a large mural for a Kent, WA Parks Building and the poster used nationally for the U.S. Marine Corps "Toys for Tots" program.

Anne Young and he married in 1989 and began to travel internationally to attend conventions and exhibitions. His work has been exhibited in Vienna, Buenos Aires, Lima, Sydney, Lisbon, Brussels, Shanghai and Taiwan and he had a solo exhibition of his paintings in England in 1999. Following the exhibition he traveled for some months in Italy. Brom painted for Andy Warhol at the Kennedy Center in Wash. DC in 1979 and he met President George Bush in 1989 while participating in an international art festival hosted by VSA Arts, an educational affiliate of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They also arranged for him to give a demonstration of his painting to the Emperor and Empress of Japan.

Active on several boards of directors, he also is past president of the Puget Sound Group of Northwest Painters (1992-93) and was appointed Washington State Arts Commissioner in 2007. For more than thirty years he has worked at the Burke Museum of Natural History at the University of Washington. As receptionist and information specialist he assists the public in their queries to the various departments and was a guest lecturer to the Museology and ESL Departments.